The paper provides an introduction to the field of embodied cognitive science from a biological and behavioural perspective. We show how the field of neuro-ethology can help transform cognitive science from a representational to an embodied perspective. The transformation is necessary to introduce a bottom-up approach to understanding cognition in order to resolve some fundamental problems with...

This paper deals with the relationship between the embodied cognition paradigm and two sets of its implications: its implications for the ontology of selves, and its implications for the nature and extent of phenomenal consciousness. There has been a recent wave of interest within cognitive science in the paradigm variously called ‘embodied,’ ‘extended,’ ‘situated’ or ‘distributed’ cognition. A...

The recent rise of interest in situated and embodied cognition has a strong interdisciplinary flavor, with contributions from robotics, cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, and developmental psychology, among other disciplines. However, social psychology has been almost completely unrepresented. Social psychologists investigate the ways people perceive, interact with, and influence eac...

19 The recent rise of interest in situated and embodied cognition has a strong interdisciplinary flavor, with contributions from 20 robotics, cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, and developmental psychology, among other disciplines. However, 21 social psychology has been almost completely unrepresented. Social psychologists investigate the ways people perceive, 22 interact with, and i...

Influences of perceptual and motor activity on evaluation have led to theories of embodied cognition suggesting that putatively complex judgments can be carried out using only perceptual and motor representations. We present an experiment that revisited a movement-compatibility effect in which people are faster to respond to positive words by pulling a lever than by pushing a lever and are fast...

The nature of cognition is being re-considered. Instead of emphasizing formal operations on abstract symbols, the new approach foregrounds the fact that cognition is, rather, a situated activity, and suggests that thinking beings ought therefore be considered first and foremost as acting beings. The essay reviews recent work in Embodied Cognition, provides a concise guide to its principles, att...

Traditionally, the language faculty was supposed to be a device that maps linguistic inputs to semantic or conceptual representations. These representations themselves were supposed to be distinct from the representations manipulated by the hearer's perceptual and motor systems. Recently this view of language has been challenged by advocates of embodied cognition. Drawing on empirical studies o...

The very term ‘neuromorphic engineering’ implies that the structural details of neural circuits cannot be abstracted away in digital simulations: in other words, morphology (the form and function of biological neurons) matters. In embodied cognition,1 this message is also being proclaimed: it is now recognized that the agent’s physical body is plays a major role in intelligent action, and canno...

It is currently debated whether the meanings of words and objects are represented, in whole or in part, in a modality-specific format-the embodied cognition hypothesis. I argue that the embodied/disembodied cognition debate is either largely resolved in favor of the view that concepts are represented in an amodal format, or at a point where the embodied and disembodied approaches are no longer ...